A theoretical and applied convective heat transfer model for deep-buried underground tunnels with non-constant wall temperature

Abstract

Underground tunnel ventilating has been used in many hydropower stations to reduce the building energy consumption of the underground space by precooling or preheating air. The tunnel wall temperature has an important influence on the cooling or preheating performance of the deeply buried underground tunnels. To solve the problem that the heat balance equation is difficult to solve due to the wall temperature variation along the tunnel, a simple heat transfer model under the non-constant wall temperature condition was developed. The developed model is validated against field tests which showed good agreement between the model results and test data. Field tests of underground traffic tunnels in 5 hydropower stations show that the maximum and minimum attenuations reach 13.0 °C and 2.2 °C, respectively. The comparison results show that the relative deviation of the prediction value of the developed model is 3.72% lower than that of the existing constant wall temperature model. Furthermore, the developed model is used for performance simulation of tunnel ventilation for real great hydropower stations, and the conclusions show that the maximum deviations between the calculated model and tested values range from 0.34 °C to 2.76 °C, and the maximum relative deviations range from 1.89% to 9.69%. In addition, the average relative deviations range from 1.13% to 2.40%. Data comparison verifies that the developed model established in this paper has accurate prediction performance, which is conducive to the design optimization of air conditioning and utilization of natural thermal for underground hydropower stations.